The Emperor's Revenge

THREE

As he descended, Juan could see more clearly the rock outcroppings that jutted from the giant sand dunes at irregular intervals and he hoped that none of the dune buggies had made a hard landing on any of them. Since there were nine men and only three seats on each buggy, a bent frame or broken axle would leave at least three of them stranded in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Juan knew who would draw the short straws, if it came to that. Nazari wouldn’t hesitate to leave them behind, especially since he seemed to have his own way out of Algeria if he planned to kill Juan, Eddie, and Linc.

Juan floated down right next to his team, but the untrained Egyptians had landed all over the place in heaps.

With his chute cast aside, Juan climbed the nearest dune to survey the location. The sun was scorching. His headscarf kept a little of the heat at bay, and he was happy to have the latest lightweight ballistic fabric sewn into his clothes instead of the Kevlar body armor that soldiers lugged around.

“There are the Scorpions,” he said, pointing at the desert patrol vehicles that had landed in a line in the adjacent dune valley. “Get ours detached from the chutes and pallet.”

“What about you?” Eddie asked.

Juan saw Nazari closing on two other Egyptians to their left. One of the men was lying on the ground, writhing in pain.

“I’m going to see what happened to him. Come pick me up when you get the Scorpion ready.”

Juan walked carefully down the slope to keep from starting a mini-avalanche. The loose, fine-grained sand made for slow going, and driving over it would be tricky.

He reached the injured man at the same time as Nazari. He was one of the inexperienced jumpers. His face was contorted in agony.

The man attending to him turned to Nazari and said, “His lower leg is broken. He landed on that rock and his leg buckled.” He nodded to an outcropping beside them, although the unnatural angle of the man’s shin made the explanation unnecessary.

Juan felt a familiar twinge at seeing the gruesome injury. He had lost his own leg below the knee in a battle with a Chinese gunboat. He’d grown accustomed to the prosthetic limb he wore, so much so that Nazari would never suspect he wasn’t a two-legged man, but the phantom pain of the missing leg never fully subsided.

Juan bent down to examine the damage. Then he looked at Nazari. “Both the tibia and fibula have snapped. We’ll have to set it and then fashion a splint. He won’t be able to walk on it, so he’ll either need help or we’ll have to get him some kind of crutch.”

“You’re sure?” Nazari asked.

“I’m not a doctor, but I’ve seen this kind of injury before.”

Nazari nodded. Without another word, he drew his pistol and put two rounds into the man’s head.

Juan leaped to his feet and stared at Nazari and the 9mm SIG Sauer in his hand.

“We don’t have time for all that,” Nazari said calmly. “He would just be a hindrance.”

The other man jumped up, and it seemed as if he were about to make a big mistake by taking a step toward Nazari.

“He’s now a martyr,” Nazari said to his soldier. “As we all eventually will be. We couldn’t take him with us, and leaving him here to die of thirst would be cruel. Get our Scorpion prepared to go. As I said, we don’t have much time.”

The soldier stepped back, took one last look at his comrade, and ran toward the buggies.

“He doesn’t understand like you and I do,” Nazari said to Juan. “I can see it in you. We’re both alike.”

Juan nearly shuddered at the thought. “How is that?”

“We both are willing to do what it takes to accomplish the mission.”

Before Juan could respond to the insult that Nazari meant as a compliment, Eddie and Linc arrived in Scorpion 1, with Eddie driving and Linc on the .50 caliber in back. The 200-horsepower engine growled as it pulled up next to him. The only thing that distinguished it from the other dune buggies was the small “1” stenciled on the side.

Eddie looked at the corpse and said, “What happened?”

“Our client was just showing me his resolve,” Juan said. Nazari’s eyes didn’t betray any understanding, but they regarded him coolly.

Juan climbed into the front passenger seat behind the 40mm grenade launcher and donned the helmet Eddie handed to him.

Scorpion 2 showed up a few moments later and Nazari got in.

When the third dune buggy was ready, Nazari led the way, peering down at a GPS unit as they drove up and over dunes and around the bigger rocks.

Nazari had ensured they would be far from the drop zone when they reached their destination. Thirty minutes into their drive, Juan spotted the glint of sun on metal in the distance, shimmering in the heat rising off the sand.

“Is that a mirage?” he asked. The helmet-mounted communication system linked Juan to Eddie and Linc only.

Linc, who was higher in his seat in the back, said, “I don’t think so, but I can’t make out what it is.”

Nazari must have seen it as well because his Scorpion adjusted course and accelerated toward it.

“Must be our target,” Juan responded.

Eddie goosed the throttle to keep pace. When they got within four hundred yards of the object, its shape became apparent.

It was the bright aluminum tail of an airplane. Although it showed signs of weathering, it seemed to be in decent condition. Juan suspected that it had been buried by the shifting sands and was only recently uncovered by a storm. Wandering nomads loyal to Nazari’s cause must have reported it.

“That looks like it’s been here a while,” Juan said.

The tail section was big enough to be part of a medium-sized passenger plane, but Juan could soon make out a new detail.

Not only did the rear part of the fuselage have no windows but it sported the familiar Stars and Bars roundel of the United States Air Force.

“That’s either a cargo jet or bomber,” Juan said. He squinted at the tail. The black numbers stenciled on it were faded but still visible.

“Linc?”

“I’m on it,” Linc replied. He surreptitiously checked a database about WMDs he’d downloaded to his handheld tablet computer and plugged in the number to see if it matched any known missing planes.

Less than ten seconds later, Linc said, “I got it. Serial number 52-534 is a B-47 strategic bomber that went missing in 1956 on a transatlantic flight to Morocco. It was part of a four-plane formation that was supposed to rendezvous with a tanker for refueling, but when they came out of some heavy overcast, this one was missing.”

“They must have had some kind of equipment malfunction and gone off course,” Eddie said.

Juan assumed he now knew why Nazari had hired them to come all this way, but then he tilted his head in thought. The B-47 was designed to carry ten-thousand-pound thermonuclear weapons over the Soviet Union. But if this plane had gone down in a controlled enough manner to take it hundreds of miles off course and come to rest relatively intact, the pilot must have jettisoned that heavy load before attempting his landing. Even if he hadn’t, this expedition didn’t have the equipment to carry such a tremendous load, and no one on Nazari’s team had the expertise to dismantle a nuclear bomb. It couldn’t be what they were after.

“Was it declared a Broken Arrow?” Juan asked, using the term for a missing nuclear device.

“Yes,” Linc said as they pulled to a stop next to the tail. He stuffed the tablet back into his bag. “They searched for it for weeks. Even called in the British Navy and French Foreign Legion to look for it.”

“What was it carrying?” Juan asked as he saw Nazari climb out of Scorpion 2, a malevolent smile breaking the Egyptian’s stoic demeanor for the first time. “Something portable, right?”

He turned to see Linc flip up his helmet’s visor and nod grimly. “The plane was transporting atomic bomb components to a base in Europe. Sitting about fifty feet away from us, somewhere under that sand, are two plutonium nuclear weapon cores.”